Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  While Dali might have been pleased with the reaction of Bonwit’s customers, Bonwit’s management was not. By noon, the feather-clad figure in “Day” and the sleeping figure in “Night” had been removed and replaced by two standing mannequins in smartly tailored suits. But by then word of Dali’s windows had spread through the nearby Fifty-seventh Street galleries and from there to Greenwich Village. When Jackson Pollock and Peter Busa heard the story, they headed off to Midtown to see “what work of art had caused such a ruckus.” Meanwhile, Dali, who had been catching up on his sleep at the St. Moritz hotel, decided to inspect his handiwork. On seeing the altered windows, he screamed and “stormed” into the crowded store, “sizzling in Spanish and French,” according to one account. He had been “hired to do a work of art,” he declared appassionata, his famous mustache quivering with rage, not to have his name “associated with typical window dressing.” Utterly unappeased by the store’s manager or, in turn, the store’s lawyer (who spoke both Spanish and French), Dali rampaged through cosmetics and hats until he reached the offending windows. Once inside, in full view of the crowd that had gathered on the street, he began dismantling his creation. When he yanked at the tub, it came loose from its moorings, slid forward and crashed through the window. Startled and off-balance, Dali followed it onto the sidewalk.

  “We had just walked up,” Busa remembers, “when we heard the crash of this big plate window and we looked and there was Dali sitting next to this bathtub in the middle of the sidewalk. … Jackson laughed about that for days.” Jackson may also have noticed in the paper the next day that a night court judge suspended Dali’s sentence for disorderly conduct. “These are some of the privileges,” said the judge, “that an artist with temperament seems to enjoy.”

  Dali’s antics announced to an unprepared America that the Surrealists had arrived. Within the next three years, he would be joined by virtually the entire Surrealist movement: Nicolas Calas, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Andr�� Masson, Roberto Matta, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Wolfgang Paalen, Man Ray, Kay Sage, Kurt Seligmann, and Yves Tanguy, as well as the group’s imperious leader, André Breton—all of them swept in on the vast tide of European artists and intellectuals fleeing the war in Europe. The same tide brought the leaders of other movements, from Cubism (Léger) to de Stijl (Mondrian), but none came with as many followers or arrived amid such fanfare; none could boast such articulate spokesmen, such disciplined ranks, such newsworthy high jinks, or such galvanic rhetoric. “To many young American artists like me,” says Peter Busa, “it seemed like, finally, here was an art movement that had everything.”

  In fact, Dali’s antics only betrayed the disarray at the heart of the Surrealist movement. In twenty years of trying, no artist, not even one as inventive and visionary as Picasso, had been able to capture, in a coherent imagery, Surrealism’s abstruse, literary essence. There had been many attempts, many partial or temporary successes, and even some great art, but the promise was still unfulfilled.

  It wasn’t a surprising predicament for an art movement that began by denying that art existed at all.

  Like many nihilistic theories, Surrealism sprang from the despair and disillusionment that followed World War I. That war, so inexplicable, so avoidable, and so costly, had convinced many European artists and intellectuals, especially the young who had seen their generation decimated, that traditional bourgeois society was bankrupt. Frustrated, angry, and guilt-ridden, they denounced traditional painting and sculpture for their cozy alliance with the discredited order. They dismissed traditional works of art as “jewels for the bourgeoisie” and gleefully flouted artistic conventions. In 1919, Marcel Duchamp exhibited a photograph of the Mona Lisa, the great icon of Western art, on which he had painted a mustache and goatee. The following year, Francis Picabia affixed a stuffed monkey to a canvas and labeled it “Portrait of Rembrandt, Portrait of Cézanne, Portrait of Renoir.” Even the movement’s name reflected a taste for the arbitrary and the absurd. A group of artists inserted a knife in a dictionary and landed by chance on the French word for a child’s hobbyhorse: dada. The leading Dadaist poet, Jacques Vaché, put the movement’s philosophy in a nutshell: “ART does not exist.”

  But if art did not exist, then neither did artists. Some Dadaists, owning up to their new philosophy, abandoned art altogether. In 1920, Duchamp gave up “anti-art” in favor of engineering and chess. Others, like Vaché, abandoned everything by committing suicide. The majority, however, realizing that nothing would come of nothing, underwent a timely “dialectical transformation.” After three years of bickering and recrimination, presided over by the autocratic Breton, the old movement regrouped around the less nihilistic proposition that art, when properly construed, was not the tool of irrational forces, it was a tool for exploring irrational forces. Dada became Surrealism.

  In Europe, it was the era of Freud and psychoanalysis—an era dedicated to the notion that rational life is governed by irrational forces. In the great soul-searching that followed the Great War, every new intellectual movement took its turn on the Viennese doctor’s couch. Breton visited Freud in Vienna in 1921 and later wrote him a letter that Freud described as “the most touching I ever received.” But Breton had little interest in the therapeutic essence of Freud’s theories. He didn’t want to cure disturbances in the psyche, he wanted to exploit them: to open a window on the disorderly inner world, not close it. According to one historian of the Surrealist movement, “Without too much respect for the detail of Freud’s model of the mental processes, [Breton] seized on the idea that there is a vast untapped reservoir of experience, thought and desire, hidden away from conscious, everyday living.” The way to tap that reservoir, said Breton, was through dreams, free association, word games, and hypnotic trances—any kind of mental activity that was “dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason,” or “outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.” The Surrealists called such mental activity “psychic automatism” and hailed it as “the true function of thought.” An artist who could thus liberate his imagination from reason, aesthetics, and morality would produce artworks that reflected a “superior reality.” Breton summarized his theory in the famous credo: “I believe in the future resolution of the two states, apparently so contradictory, of dream and reality, in a sort of absolute reality, of surreality.”

  Breton’s elegant theories proved far easier to express in words than in images. Artists, understandably, had trouble ridding themselves of “all aesthetic preoccupations.” Did Breton’s injunction against conscious control apply to content or style? To the choice of images or to the manner in which those images were rendered? In capturing the “omnipotent” dreamworld, should an artist recreate, as accurately as possible, the images that he has seen in dreams? Or should he try to paint while in a dreamlike state—a state in which conscious control is minimized? Around this core dilemma, Surrealist art quickly degenerated into polite civil war.

  In one camp, artists like Salvador Dali and René Magritte “illustrated” their dreams, rendering bizarre but recognizable images in trompe l’oeil detail. Borrowing liberally from Freud, Dali created a vocabulary of feverish sexual imagery (disembowelment, masturbation, castration, hermaphrodism) and called his images “hand-painted dream photographs.” Magritte also used psychoanalytic theory, basing his images of room-sized apples and levitating rocks on Freud’s contention that dream dislocations reveal important unconscious associations. But to convey these modern psychological insights, both Dali and Magritte relied on literal images painted with the academic precision of nineteenth-century neoclassicism.

  In the other camp, a group of artists led by Jean Arp and Joan Miró experimented with images that were not merely records of a previous unconscious experience, but direct products of the unconscious. They called their method of creating images “automatism,” because the artist’s actions were, theoretically, automatic—“dictated in the absence of all control by reason.” To achieve truly automatic images, they deprive
d themselves of all the artist’s traditional crutches: time, planning, content, facility, and conventional materials. Oscar Dominguez pressed black gouache between sheets of glazed paper, then peeled them apart to see what patterns the squeezed pigment had formed. Max Ernst, in a process called frottage, placed sheets of paper over rough objects, such as floorboards, then rubbed with a soft pencil, creating ghost-like images. Wolfgang Paalen waved a lighted candle in front of a canvas, leaving a trail of burns and smoke stains in a technique known as fumage.

  No artist was more determined to liberate himself from the “finessed mechanics of the peinture-peinture tradition” than André Masson, a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts who had been severely wounded in the trenches of the Western Front. He began conventionally enough with pen and ink, just “let[ting] his hand travel rapidly over the paper, forming a web of lines from which images began to emerge.” When the intrusions of technique (the drag of the pen, for example) continued to plague him, he switched to an unfamiliar medium, spreading glue on the surface of a canvas, sprinkling it with sand, then dusting away the residue to reveal patches where sand had stuck to the glue. Still unsatisfied, in 1927 he began to apply paint directly from the tube, laying the canvas flat and squeezing the paint from above in long thick lines.

  They were prescient experiments. Yet, after only a few years, Masson abandoned them and returned to a more comfortable, illusionistic style. Perhaps his “over-literary imagination” was ill suited to the demands of creating art in the absence of all aesthetic preoccupations. He had come closer than any of his confreres to achieving the Surrealist goal of tapping the unconscious, but it would take another artist—one with a richer, more accessible, more impacted unconscious—to turn Masson’s taphole into a wellspring of great art. “The subconscious is our wellspring of inspiration,” said composer Virgil Thomson. “Some need to use a pump. Others have only to cap a gusher.”

  In their search for a genuine Surrealist imagery, European artists were virtually ignored by Breton, whose first and only love was literature. A poet and essayist by training, he preferred to explore the unconscious through elaborate word games, at which he excelled. Art he considered merely a “lamentable expedient,” a form of expression that served primarily as a springboard to literary discussion (a view he would bequeath to a generation of American art critics). He was especially hostile to abstract art. According to Breton, only works with “pictorial themes” that were “transposable into language” qualified as Surrealist. By the time of the Second Manifesto in 1929, he had virtually deleted abstraction from the Surrealist canon. Automatism, he said, was a way of life, not a style of painting. Fallen from favor, Masson abandoned the movement while Dali was elevated to the unofficial post of court painter.

  It was the approved, illusionistic form of Surrealism that first reached America. As early as 1932, the dealer Julien Levy treated the New York art world to the latest innovation from Paris: “Newer Super-Realism,” a show that brought together works by de Chirico, Dali, Max Ernst, Masson, Miró, Picasso, Pierre Roy, Marcel Duchamp, and one American, Joseph Cornell. Although Levy included several artists who were not technically Surrealists, he otherwise hewed closely to the party line laid down by Breton (as he would continue to do for the next ten years), showing only works that delivered on the promise implicit in the title of the exhibition. The critics compounded Levy’s error, lauding the new movement as “the return of trompe l’oeil painting.” One reviewer defined Surrealism as a style in which “the artist sees his subject clearly [and] paints it sharply.”

  It was a definition that was bound to alienate most young American artists. In fact, except for Levy and a few critics, illusionistic Surrealism was virtually without allies in the American art community. Militant young abstractionists like Lee Krasner deplored its reliance on nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil techniques. Regionalists like Tom Benton dismissed its psychological subject matter as hopelessly un-American. Even the few critics who praised the new movement suggested that it take up American subject matter—a proposal that would have left Breton aghast. The arrival of Salvador Dali in 1934 on the first of his many trips to America won no new friends for Surrealism. While his flamboyant personality, public antics, and exuberant speech-making brought him widespread public attention, they only reinforced the impression that Surrealism was a one-room mansion in which most American artists would never feel at home. Only those few who read French and followed developments in the magazine Minotaure knew of Surrealism’s other side still hidden from American view.

  Not until February 1936, when Alfred Barr presented “Cubism and Abstract Art” at the Museum of Modern Art, was the other side revealed. Many American artists learned about automatism and “abstract Surrealism” for the first time from the show’s catalogue, written by Barr. Both show and catalogue concentrated on works by Masson, Miró, Klee, and Arp that illustrated automatic techniques. Barr described these works as “done in a state of semi-hypnosis in which conscious control is presumably abandoned.” By including such notions in a Cubist exhibition, Barr not only enlightened American artists, perhaps including Jackson, he also conferred on abstract Surrealism instant legitimacy.

  The following December, Surrealist art finally burst on the American scene with the largest exhibition ever presented at an American museum. “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism,” also mounted by Barr, was a kaleidoscope of nearly seven hundred entries that attracted more critical attention than any exhibition since the Armory Show of 1913. It included Man Ray’s The Lovers, Max Ernst’s The Hat Makes the Man, and Meret Oppenheim’s Fur-Covered Cup, Saucer and Spoon as well as works by “every artist associated with the movement in even the most remote sense.” After being lulled by Dali’s harmless antics for half a decade, American art finally woke up to the grand ambitions and dark power of the Surrealist vision. With the notable exception of Lewis Mumford, however, most critics did not appreciate the shock. They called it a “sham,” a “maelstrom,” “a farce,” “a huge absurdity,” “the supreme hoax.” Martha Davidson, writing in Art News, argued that the public was “bound to be amused or outraged,” and that if some of the paintings “repulse the visitor they have achieved precisely what they set out to do.” Davidson was not the only critic who was put in mind of Kurt Schwitters’s terse summary of Dadaist aesthetics: “All an artist spits is art.”

  Arshile Gorky was among the handful of American artists who dismissed the criticism and embraced the art. In many ways, Gorky was the first American Surrealist: the first to recite Surrealist manifestos, the first to read Minotaure, the first to incorporate Surrealist theory into his paintings. He was soon joined by William Baziotes, an artist from Reading, Pennsylvania, and Gerome Kamrowski, a student at the New Bauhaus in Chicago who arrived in New York in the fall of 1938 and met Baziotes the following summer at a party in honor of Wolfgang Paalen. Fresh from the ideological battles with Regionalism and Social Realism, these artists rejected Dali’s figurative, illusionistic imagery out of hand. “We considered Dali an illustrator,” recalls Peter Busa, another early American Surrealist, “and that was the dirtiest word you could call an artist.” But abstract Surrealism was a revelation. The profusion of automatist techniques appealed to a community of artists obsessed with plastic concerns. Over the next few years, American artists would seize this tantalizing, inchoate new concept and make it their own. “Automatism,” said Robert Motherwell, “was the first modern theory of creating that was introduced into America early enough to allow American artists to be equally adventurous or even more adventurous than their European counterparts.”

  More so than any painter since Masson, Baziotes took Surrealist theory at its word. Like Gorky, he carefully studied the organic shapes of Miró and Jean Arp, and experimented with automatist techniques such as coulage (poured paint). He rode the subway to Columbia to study Rorschach ink blots. He also tirelessly disseminated Surrealist theory to his wide circle of friends, one of whom was Jackson Pollock.

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bsp; There’s no way of knowing how Jackson responded to the theories of Surrealism as Baziotes explained them. How quickly did he see the many parallels between Surrealist theory and his own art as it emerged from Orozco, Bloomingdale’s, and Jungian analysis? How surprised was he to hear (months, presumably, before his first encounter with John Graham) echoes of his own highly personalized method of working from the unconscious in Baziotes’s explanation of automatism? How soon did he realize that he was better equipped—artistically and psychologically—than any other American artist to realize the promise of Surrealist theory?

  Clearly, his discussions with Baziotes had an edge of déjà vu. Sometime in the fall of 1939 or the following winter, the two men arrived at Gerome Kamrowski’s studio on Sullivan Street arguing heatedly about whether Jackson’s experiments at Siqueiros’s workshop in 1936 constituted “automatism” as defined by the Surrealists. Baziotes, who refused to believe that Surrealism had been upstaged by a discredited Mexican muralist, “was bringing [Jackson] over trying to win an argument,” Kamrowski recalled. “He was enthusiastically talking about the new freedoms and techniques of painting and noticing the quart cans of lacquer asked if he could use some to show Pollock [the techniques].” On a canvas of Kamrowski’s that “wasn’t going well,” Baziotes began dribbling white paint in a spiral motion using a palette knife. After a minute or two, he stood back and “interpreted” the spirals as a “bird’s nest.” He then handed the palette knife to Jackson who made some “quick whipping movements of the wrist, flinging the paint onto the canvas,” according to Karnrowski, but when he was done, “declined to comment on any meaning.” Before long, Kamrowski joined in with a palette knife of his own and the “demonstration” quickly degenerated into a “very free kind of activity.” When they stopped, Kamrowski felt Baziotes had “made his point,” but Jackson was still “puzzling the thing out.”